Why would it do that? A company in such rude health must be
getting offers it can't refuse. And it must face questions from customers
concerned it could be snapped up by big six player, or that it could have a
less-than-successful IPO, like Violin did.

Dietzen said Pure had been approached by half a dozen
potential buyers, but it has decided to hold out. He believes that Pure has the
strength to stay the course to achieve a place alongside the giants of storage.

"Why? Our numbers are really good - we've been growing at
50% a quarter sequentially - and we have a desire to stay independent for the
long term. All storage is going to shift to flash and if you're not growing at
40% to 50% a quarter you're not going to maintain market share there."

"I'm frequently called on to answer questions about why we're
not entertaining M&A conversations. We're a private company that has
shareholders to look after. But that said, our shareholders see that ultimately
a market leader in the flash array space is worth tens of billions of dollars
and that we are on track to achieve that."

"Ultimately, companies get to be as big as they deserve to
be. If you do what you do as well as we have you are not available as an
acquisition target. We've experienced huge growth and see the same in front of
us. This is how market-leading companies get built; they're the ones that
outpace the others."

And finally, Dietzen stuck the boot into hybrid flash arrays,
which he characterised as a poor substitute for all-flash.

He said, "Hybrid flash is marketed as providing the
performance of flash with the cost of disk. But often what you get is the
performance of disk at the cost of flash. Disk is so much slower than flash so
if 95% of I/O goes to flash and 5% to disk the overall performance will be 5x
slower."